The Softest Light
by Roose Bolton
Summary: Harry's Firebolt is confiscated. Scabbers is missing, and maybe dead. And out there still lurks notorious killer Sirius Black, wanting Harry dead. In the winter of her third year, Hermione Granger is alone, besieged by classwork, and afraid her best friends want nothing to do with her. Lost deep in the darkness, she grabs hold of any hope she can. One-Shot.


Now she's done it.

Hermione was only trying to help, and she thinks – no, she _knows_ – she has helped. She was right. Wasn't she? How could anything else justify seeing Harry and Ron's delight at that broom, that Firebolt, wiped away by Professor McGonagall's confiscating it? It was because of her. Her word. Give it time, she'd told herself that night during the winter holidays with no one to talk to and her homework, so, so much of it, piling up. They'll understand. Quidditch is just a game. Harry means so much more, and with Sirius Black at loose, she'll do what she has to if it protects her friends.

But that time of understanding doesn't come. After the winter break ends and the student body returns, a malaise washes over Hogwarts's corridors like the prodrome of a deep depression. It is her feeling of when the Dementors had entered their compartment on the Hogwarts Express months ago, when Harry fainted, when she felt as if all the happiness in the world had been snuffed out like a candlelight at bedtime. She walks the halls and not a single friendly face or kind word welcomes her. She works on classwork in the common room and she knows in every other corner loom those bitter eyes, those scowls, a storm bringing in the snow from outside and blanketing her world in frost. She buries her face in her work, her books, and fights back the anxiety clawing at her insides. She was only trying to help.

She heard them once, two days before Ravenclaw played Slytherin in Quidditch. Walking down the corridor to Arithmancy, she spotted a pair of fourth-year Gryffindor boys amidst heated conversation.

"Potter got a Firebolt? No lie?" breathed one boy. "And McGonagall took it?"

"Someone ratted Potter out," the other boy muttered.

The first winced. "Who?"

"That Hermione Granger who's always doing homework."

"I thought she was friends with Potter. Like with Ron Weasley."

"She was. I guess not anymore."

They saw her then, their expressions of pain and loss contorting into anger. One stood up and bumped her shoulder as she walked past. "Trying to sabotage us, Granger?"

"Go back to your books," the other growled with a sneer.

She rushed away, fighting back tears.

The pressure piles on like a mountain of stones on her chest. She falls asleep in the library one evening with two Arithmancy books spread open before her, only to be woken an hour and a half later by Madam Pince. "What are you doing?" Pince demands as Hermione awakens, groggy, her body shrieking for the rest she's deprived it of. "The library closed a half-hour ago, Miss Granger."

"I'm sorry," she squeaks. "I didn't mean to."

"Get your things and go back to your common room. Hurry, now."

Again she fights back tears, just holding on this time, but her strength is fading.

Arithmancy. Divination. Ancient Runes. Muggle Studies. There is so much to do, and even with a time-turner she has so little time. She soldiers on. Homework. Classes. She combs the library for legal cases and court verdict precedent for Buckbeak and Hagrid. Work and loneliness devour her. Everywhere the magic and spirit of winter swirls around the old castle, and then there is her, the outlier. She is a black standing stone in the middle of a snow-covered field, the land white and smooth and beautiful but for her, the dark blotch that draws the eye and causes the onlooker's smile to flicker. A blemish. Something to be lanced.

But she soldiers on. Alone. She has to.

At nine years old she had run home from school with another report card lined with perfect marks. Her father had picked her up and spun her around in the chilly winter air and she had laughed, all of nine and knowing only the joy of the moment, Dad's crinkled eyes, his ear-to-ear smile, his red cheeks in the cold. "I'm so proud of you, Hermione," he'd said. He'd said it every time she brought home another report card, every time nothing but perfection. Every time just as proud. "You worked hard, and look! You did a great job."

Hard work pays. And now, her face crammed in front of three different runic charts as Fred and George Weasley light sparklers in the common room, she rubs her eyes and tells herself focus, focus. She has to work harder. She will work harder.

Again she falls asleep, and again when she wakes she is alone. Fred and George are gone, asleep like the rest of the Gryffindors save her. The common room is dark, and snow billows outside. There is a hollow in her chest, a pounding in her head, and something else, something deep and pressed against her very soul, like a hand gripping her innermost self and leeching her breath away.

It is dark, and the light has faded. For a moment, just the tiniest moment, she thinks none of this is worth it.

No! cries out every impulse, but the darkness is relentless and now it has sniffed out a weakness in her defenses. Her walls fall and the barbarians at the gate are loose. You're not going to get any of this done. Buckbeak's going to die because you couldn't help Hagrid. You'll fail all your exams. After Professor McGonagall trusted you enough to let you take this many classes, you're going to let her down.

Ron's never going to talk to you again.

Harry won't listen. He's angry at you, and you were the only thing stopping him from doing something reckless. One of these days Sirius Black is going to find him and hurt him – and maybe kill him – and it's your stupid fault.

But I tried, she tells herself. I did the right thing. But her banners are trampled, her guards are bloody and exhausted in the street, and she has nothing, no one, to hold back the darkness.

You are just that girl you were your first year, when you had no friends, when you were a nightmare in Charms, according to Ron. When you were crying in the girls' toilet and a troll found you, that last night before everything changed, before you stepped into a dream. Now that dream has died, she has woken up, and the light has left her for good. You are friendless. Alone. And now you always will be.

The tears are there, so close, until she hears footsteps on the staircase and hurries to collect her classwork. She lights a candle, for though it may be the witching hour she still has two feet of parchment to write about ancient runic scripts of the late Pictish wizards.

"Hermione?"

She jumps, looks up. Her heart flutters.

Ginny stands there by the stairs to the girls' dormitories, wrapped in a purple nightgown. "Why're you up?" she asks.

Hermione shakes her head. Focus. Focus. "Homework," she says, her voice skipping an octave higher on the second syllable. "Just busy, you know." She can't make eye contact with Ginny. It's for her good, she tells herself. Ginny's gone through so much. Don't burden her with your troubles. Besides, she's Ron's sister. Doubtless she'll blame you for the Firebolt trouble as well.

Yet Ginny is persistent. She sits on a cushion opposite Hermione, picks up _Unfogging the Future_, and frowns. "This looks ghastly," she says.

"It's just another chapter I have to read for tomorrow," she says, writing as she talks. _Pictish runic languages observed by magiarchaeologists in Orkney were seen to converge and unify into a single script around the time of the Viking raids during the eighth century C.E., which spread – _no, not "around," too vague. Do better. Be more precise. And that's a run-on sentence. Come on, Hermione. Focus.

Ginny looks mortified. "It's two in the morning."

"Well, I have to get it done."

"Hermione, you're not going to get it done tonight, even if you never sleep."

She sighs and pressed her face into her hands. Heat blooms across her cheeks. Her heart accelerates, but her pulse is weak, whimpering, a faded little tempo lost in the barrows of her chest. "You should get back to sleep, Ginny," she mumbles.

Ginny stands but doesn't retreat to the dormitory. "Don't let Ron get to you," she says. "He can be a git sometimes. When you live with him long enough you know it."

Hermione looks up. How does she do it? Ginny is just twelve, but she speaks with the conviction of a woman, with the strength of a hardened witch. Where is that frightened little girl with Tom Riddle's diary who Harry saved from the Chamber of Secrets? Where is that shy little witch Hermione catches casting furtive glances Harry's way, as if he'll know what's bubbling inside her? How can she be two people at once, both all of twelve and someone so strong?

"I know," Hermione says. It's all she can muster.

"I know you told McGonagall about the Firebolt because of Harry," Ginny says. "And I'm glad you did." She turns to the stairs. "Good-night."

Hermione watches her until she's gone. She rubs her eyes again, the world blurry, unfocused, grainy, a picture in greyscale like a scene from a silent movie. Then she folds up her runic charts and blows out the candle.

It seems like the turning point. McGonagall returns Harry's Firebolt, no jinxes or curses to be found, and the Gryffindors seem to forget her entirely as they stand in the common room admiring the broom. Ron is so impressed he ferries the Firebolt to their dormitory personally, and when Harry sits next to her and asks about her workload, she thinks, for just a moment, that everything will return to normal. She'll get through this. They'll be together again. Harry. Ron. Her. All things pass.

Then Ron comes downstairs with a bedsheet stained with blood, shouting of his pet rat, his lost, possibly dead, Scabbers, his anger homing like an arrow on Crookshanks, and on her. His frustration and annoyance at her has twisted into something even worse. It is rage. Fury. A barrier risen between them that will never come down.

Ron's never going to talk to you again.

Just when she thought she could see the light, the darkness closes in once more. It will not let her go so easily.

She runs out of the common room, dragging her books and her classwork in her tattered bag, and she flings it all into a heap beside her bed. Damn the mess. Forget the clutter. She lays down on her bed and Crookshanks jumps up, purring, nuzzling her cheek. Hermione sits up, hugs Crookshanks as tightly as she can, and cries.

At last the darkness has sacked her. Her towers are burning. Her vaults are plundered. The last vestiges of her confidence are scattered and lost to the wind. She has nothing, no one. And she cries.

Look into the black. Feel its wintry breath. Now let go and fall into the night.

Deep down she knows a tiny truth, one that struggles to break free in the ashen days to come. She is right. Crookshanks is innocent. Ron has never liked him. And Ron's rat was old and dying anyway, wasn't it? But the blizzard of emotions takes her in its frozen embrace and shatters her control until she pushes away even Harry's clumsy attempts at remedying the situation.

Focus, Hermione. Focus on your work. It is all you have.

There is one place left she feels she can speak honestly. Where she can feel anything right at all.

She tromps down to Hagrid's hut one afternoon with her bag full of library books and notes she's scribbled that stretch for whole feet of parchment, every effort she's mustered to help Buckbeak. She feels ready to fall apart on the long walk across the frost-glazed grounds. The cold slips through her coat and her scarf, as if it comes not just from the air but from within. As if it has always been with her.

Hagrid is on the verge of tears when he sees her efforts sprawled across his table. "Merlin's beard, Hermione," he chokes, sifting through her notes scribbled in perfect handwriting, legible enough for him to cite in a courtroom. "Yeh did all this fer Beaky?"

"It's the best I could find," she says, her voice small.

"Bes' anyone could do. Studen' or teacher or even any bloody court official," Hagrid gruffs. He beams, and Hermione sees something there, something she has not seen in what feels like a very long time. "How come Harry an' Ron didn' come down with yeh?"

Now her walls fall again. She does not want to cry in front of Hagrid, does not want to burden yet another with her problems, but her strength has run out. As her tears flow freely and she garbles her story, Hagrid brews tea and listens. Who else has listened? These months, this coldest of winters. Who has had time for her?

Hermione Granger, the brightest witch of her age. Hermione Granger, a teenage girl alone in the darkness.

Fang presses his cold, wet nose to her leg. Hagrid reaches out as if to take hold of her hand, thinks better of it, and pushes her mug of tea closer to her. "Yeh've done nothin' wrong, Hermione," he says. "Nothin' at all."

She blows her nose. Long ago, before she had known anything of magic and Hagrid and boys named Harry and Ron, her mother had come up with the idea to throw her a party for her tenth birthday. "You've earned it," Mum had told her. Three other girls from school had come, accompanied by their mothers. They'd talked to each other the entire time, and Hermione, on the periphery of her own birthday party, had floated, anxious, bewildered, unsure of what one even does at birthday parties, let alone their own. Her mother had seen the stress on her daughter's face and ended the affair in just over an hour.

That night Hermione had sat on her bed, fighting off tears, just as she did now. "Why don't they like me?" she had warbled.

"It's all right," Mum had said, holding her in a hug. When she'd let go Hermione had looked up and seen a glint in her eye. "Shh, it's all right. You've done nothing wrong, Hermione. I'm always proud of you."

She looks up now and sees that same glint as Hagrid sets his jaw.

"Tha' broom coulda been cursed," he says. "Yer righ', and had it been, Harry coulda been hurt. Killed even, blimey. And look a'this all. Yeh migh've saved Beaky."

"Ron's rat…" she begins, but Hagrid cuts her off.

"Yer cat did wha' cats do," he says. "Nothin' wrong in that." He looks at her notes again, at the books. "An' yer doin' this with all those classes. No, Hermione, I'm righ' proud of yeh. I'll talk to Ron an' Harry. Things'll be fine."

It is such a small thing, a little glow deep in his dark eyes, but it is there. The north star at midnight. The faintest of glimmers. The softest of lights. The solitary fire in the dark that refuses to die when all other fires have burnt out.

There are trials to come. Sirius Black will break into Gryffindor Tower. She'll learn his truth. She and Harry will evade a werewolf, save an innocent man, and beat time itself to do it. Ron will be her friend again. And one day, one day in the distant future, they will be more. But when she goes to sleep this night, this one night, she pushes back the darkness and drifts off, dreaming of the light of distant stars.


End file.
